Here in Washington, I hear military planes flying overhead now and again. As we hunker down after the terrorist attacks and ask ourselves what's really important in life, many of us come up with the same answers.
Said one survivor quoted in The New York Times: "Before all this, I'd be afraid to ask for a day off -- or a morning off -- to take my kid to the first day of school." Another: "I'm going to walk out Friday at 12:30 and drive down and see my daughter at parents' weekend. Ordinarily, I wouldn't leave that early. People always got a hard time about it. But now I couldn't care less. If you have to do something with your family, go do it, because you might not get another chance."
If we use the terror and the sadness as an opportunity to re-center our lives, those of us whose lives center around children need to ask ourselves some hard questions. The first is whether we spend enough time with our families.
The broad-brush answer is that mothers do, but fathers often don't. In her 2000 presidential address to the Population Association of America, Suzanne Bianchi, a demographer with the Center on Population, Gender, and Social Inequality at the University of Maryland at College Park, reported that "mothers today are spending as much time with their children as mothers did in 1965." Working mothers cut back on sleep, leisure -- anything -- to preserve their time with children. In a society where one out of four fathers works substantial overtime, fathers are around less. How much less is subject to debate. But Ellen Galinsky's book, Ask the Children (Quill, 2000) found that a majority of kids feel they spend enough time with their mothers, but they were less likely to feel that way about time spent with their fathers.
The second question we should be asking ourselves is whether committed parents are giving children the right kind of time. This, I think, is not so clear. Academic parents tend to rush from lesson to lesson, buy tapes and games to develop toddlers' cognitive abilities, suspend adult activities and conversation to make sure children are "stimulated." Some grumps complain that children today have a real "peel me a grape" attitude. With one young mother/professor of my acquaintance you really can't have a telephone conversation until her kids are asleep; until then, she's at their beck and call. I was that way, too, before my kids became teenagers and wouldn't stand for it.
All of us know, and few of us regret, that the era of "children should be seen and not heard" is long gone. That belongs to the dark ages, when the virtue of social inferiors consisted in seemly submission to social superiors. In some cultures, this approach persists, and is not inconsistent with genuine family feeling. Last week my friend Faye spoke to me of some family friends she knew through her son, whose college roommate was from Nepal. When the roommate and his brother went to the airport to meet their parents, the boys (one of whom had not seen his parents for four years) were so moved that they fell and kissed the ground on which their parents walked. Later the Nepali family came to live with Faye for a few weeks. What most amazed the visiting mother was the way Faye thanked her own children when they did something for her. The Nepalese mother asked, "Do you thank your own hand?"
The story reminds us not to demonize other ways of being even when they seem most foreign. It also offers us the opportunity to re-examine our own "common sense" notions about what children need. It turns out that those notions are of fairly recent origin. For example, if you go back and read the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books, written in the 1950s, you'll see that it's the child-free Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle who lavishes attention on the children. Their mothers are too busy. Oh, sure, they fix a snack when the kids return from school, but then they send them out to play -- unless the children are sent on errands, which is often. Meanwhile, Mother is preparing a nice dinner for her husband's boss, setting out petunias, going to Mrs. Workbasket's Earnest Worker's Club, baking like crazy. No mother in these books ever drives a child anywhere I can remember, and the only child who takes a lesson is a spoiled little rich girl.
Compare that to a mother's job today. The nurturing of children today seems not to involve training them to be a responsible and contributing member of a larger group; the focus instead is on their need for autonomy, self-confidence, and self-expression. The new ideology of children's needs is theorized by (surprise) a male doctor, Stanley Greenspan, who has argued that every child needs 30 minutes of "floor time," in which the adult should march to the child's drummer: If the child wants you to get down on all fours and bark like a dog, you should do it.
Dr. Greenspan admits that this was not part of his own childhood: His own mother put him outside in his playpen to entertain himself while she cleaned house. But plenty of academics hold themselves to his "floor-time" standard. At best, a child whose parent is down there barking does get a sense of individuality, autonomy, command. We may be raising Americans with our firm sense of rights and personal autonomy, but are we also raising them with a disturbing lack of social solidarity or sense of responsibility to others?
Quite apart from social responsibility, we need to think more deeply about the engine that drives the floor-time family: mothers' selflessness. Judith Warner, a journalist who lived in France for five years, told me of her shock upon returning to the United States. "Here, mothers, even stay-at-home mothers, have no time for themselves or their husbands. Their lives revolve totally around their children. It's very different in France. There adults take care to leave room for adult life: time to get dressed up, and go out to dinner, to make adult conversation with your husband or with friends. Now that I'm here I find myself falling into it, but I don't really think it's the way to live."
Back in the early 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that young French girls were strictly supervised whereas married women had great freedom, while in the United States, girls enjoyed tremendous freedom but wives were expected to follow a regimen of exaggerated selflessness.
What we see in motherhood today is a new version of such selflessness. It's time to reassess. Mothers who feel it would be selfish to take out time for themselves need to remember that you can't be selfless if you don't have a self. Mothers reluctant to involve their families in family work need to remember that they are setting up their daughters to repeat the cycle of work/family conflict they have seen warp their own lives. Mothers reluctant to leave the kids for a night or a weekend in order to make time for their partners need to remember the impact on children of estrangement and divorce.
We don't need to abandon our child-centeredness; we need to fine-tune it. First let's cut the flash cards. We need to be on guard against our culture's early and obsessive focus on academic achievement, to which professors in particular fall prey. We may love academic life, but we need to avoid letting our interest in achievement press in on our children when their chief concern should be learning how to pump a swing.
We also need to remember that the world does not revolve around any one adult. It isn't healthy to have the relevant world -- the family -- revolve totally around a kid. We may want to preserve our culture of autonomy and our worship of self-development -- there's a lot that's good about it. But kids need to know their nurturing reflects profound investments by various communities -- their family, their country, their world.
As I write today, on the day after we began to bomb Afghanistan, here's what I think: We need to reassess how to raise Americans who not only have a sense of what is owed to them, but of what they owe -- to their family and their world -- in return.
